Training Mission in Bio-floristic Data Requirements with GBIF France

Building on the first in-depth data capacity missions held in Benin in November 2016, a second event was organised at GBIF France in Paris. The month-long workshop focused on developing project participant’s skills in cleaning, formatting, standardization and publication of data.

Topics covered:

Introduction to Natural History Museum and Botanic Gallery, Paris

Digitisation requirements

Data cleaning and publishing

Participants were first welcomed to the Natural History Museum in Paris by Prof. Christiane Denys and followed with the second section of the workshop which introduced the participants to the Botanical Gallery of the Museum by Dr. Haevermans. Participants were given a guided tour focusing on the different areas within the museum.

The third section of the workshop included a training session outlining the practical steps to the data scanning process and digitisation. Split into the six stages, this covered labelling, digitisation (verification and installation of barcodes), image transfer (storage in servers and media libraries), partial computerisation, freezing and storage.

The fourth part of the workshop focused on the needs expressed by the participants and addressed the specific calls for training on cleaning, form, standardisation, publishing data using manipulation tools such as OpenRefine and IPT. Teaching was given using practical demonstrations and data that could be published on the GBIF site.

The outcome of the month-long mission was to familiarise the project participants with good practices of digitisation and herbarium management. In addition, strengthening the understanding of the processing and publication requirements was a step towards meeting the projects goals and enabled 1603 occurrence data to be published to the GBIF site. The acquired knowledge should help the project continue with the publication of data.